Check up on Hackshield... then install World of Tanks. You will understamd why.

Thanks for all the advice, I do have an HP (dv5000) with an AMD chipset. I have it on a
cooling pad all the time, with plenty of space around it for airflow. I think the highest
I seen it get while playing NF was about 50C.

As for the dialup, I have the option to use the ISP's compression tool, but I dont
actually use it, since it does seem to slow things down a little.

I'm running windows XP (32 bit), but have all the graphics turned down to the minimum.
So.. hopefully if I give NF another try it can run ok.

Now that I think of it, MB52, your internet connection may take some extra processing
because most of the better Dial Up ISP's use compression to enhance speed. I'm not
sure how much processing power it takes to decompress the data but that may give
you trouble.

It should be easy to tell otherwise if you're receiving hardware lag or connection lag.

You should be very very careful using an AMD laptop and gaming like audessy said. Between
NF and a couple of other games, not to mention leaving it on 24/7, I actually fried mine.

@HeroesWar

It's a HP Pavilion ze4600 from 04 or 05. However, most laptops even from 5 years ago
didn't come with over 512 megs of ram. 512 megs of ram + 5200 rpm hard drive on IDE
100 equivalent = bad and slow as hell.

I should also mention that AMD processors like mine run hot as hell and lose all
efficiency above 60c. I had to modify the air intakes for better flow and use a 80mm
desktop fan with a plastic blower case to help cool it.

How old is your laptop 10 years old?

If your laptop is running xp like mine it should do okay. Mine might be slower which
causes me to not be able to play fully zoomed out.

Tips from a fellow laptop user:
-Disable every unecessary program possible. I don't even run the ATI catalyst
manager on my system to save on ram.
-Uninstall NF, defragment, install, and defragment again. You will be using your
paging file so it helps a lot to have a good install with close sectors on the HDD.
-Get speedfan. Check your system temps. Above 60c in game or watching youtube
videos is too high. You'll want to concoct some good cooling measures. Rotating ice
packs in the freezer works good as well as extra fans.
-Turn off all extra visuals in game under the F10 menu.
-Run NF in high or low priority. Running it in high will cause input lag but the game
itself will be more responsive. Running it in low priority seems to keep the system
cooler.
-Use services.msc in the run menu to eliminate all unnecessary services such as
"Indexing Service" and "Messenger".

Hope that helps.

CPU isn't the issue I think. RAM is. Yesterday I've seen mine go up to a little over
800MB. If you have 1GB and your vid card is shared, it may cause issues, since your
O/S eats a chunk too.
Only way to find out for you is to give it a try. Let us know what you experience. I
think it's time for SDE to update the minimum system requirement section on the
website..

NF with HS installed currently uses in a room with 61 players waiting 700mb at least
thats what it said in task manager when I checked.

some players reported the CPU percentage up but mine was running at around 6-
12% with NF running

Thats one thing that troubles me... my laptop has only 1 gb of ram (that is shared with
the video card) and I can't afford a new laptop/the upgrades at this time.

Before some large rooms, took a very long time to load... if Hackshield uses some of my
ram, I fear it may cause problems.

I was hoping to get some thoughts before I dove in, because while the patch itself
probably will only take 1 -3 hours on this dialup to download, if Hackshield causes
problems on my computer (and causes lag outside of NF) I'll be forced to reinstall windows
which... is probably over a weeks worth of downloading, just to get the updates done.